You may have seen this news floating around the internet lately:
Two bodies found wrapped in a poignant embrace in their final moments as they were covered beneath molten rock and layers of ash in the ancient city of Pompeii when Mount Vesuvius violently erupted in 79 A.D.
The bodies were dubbed “The Two Maidens” when they were first discovered but in a startling discovery this week scientists found the two bodies were actually male - raising speculation that they may have been gay lovers.
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"We always imagined that it was an embrace between women. But a CAT scan and DNA have revealed that they are men. "You can’t say for sure that the two were lovers. But considering their position, you can make that hypothesis. It is difficult to say with certainty.”
It sounds pretty cool on the surface, right? But if you keep reading, if you’re sensitive to these things, one thing that jumped out at me was this:
“When this discovery was made, that they were not two young girls, some scholars suggested there could have been an emotional connection between the pair,” he said. “But we are talking about hypotheses that can never be verified.
So we have a situation where two bodies were found in what appears to be an embrace, preserved for centuries due to the ash of a volcano that hardened around them. It was assumed that they were two girls, but that there was no emotional connection between the pair?
Scientists performed CAT scans and DNA testing and found that the bodies were actually men, seemingly unrelated, about 18 and 20 years old. Why did it take the discovery that they were unrelated men to lead the scientists to hypothesize that there “could have been an emotional connection” involved? Wouldn’t that be something that could be safely hypothesized no matter the sex of the individuals?
Reading through some of the stories about it, I was becoming increasingly annoyed by the weird assumptions that had been at play pre- and post-DNA testing. But I think Alex Bollinger at LGBTQNation sums up my frustrations much better than I can:
But what’s interesting to me, though, is the possibility that it is exactly what it seems like: two men, not related, holding each other in an affectionate way. What about that leads people to say that they were “gay lovers”?
Professor Stefano Vanacore, head of the Pompeii research team, put it this way, “When this discovery was made, that they were not two young girls, some scholars suggested there could have been an emotional connection between the pair.” Two women can’t have an emotional connection? If “emotional” is meant more like “conjugal,” then why were these two people assumed to be in a platonic relationship when they were women but in a sexual relationship now that they are thought to be men?
Talk about viewing history through the lens of the today’s culture. One thing that modern, Western people take for granted is how much policing of male affection we live with. In the US, straight men (or gay and bi men in straight spaces) usually don’t touch each other more than a handshake or a pat on the back. In France, men kissing “hello” is OK, but not much more. In other parts of the world, including parts of Africa, straight men sometimes hold hands just out of platonic friendship.
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When what people see changes based on the assumed genders of these people – while their pose remains exactly the same –then the story is really about contemporary people’s gendered standards of behavior.
Nail, meet head.
Two things are at play here: one, the idea that men showing any affection towards each other must be gay. And then the assumption that the women had no “emotional” (and I agree with Bollinger that this is meant to read as “conjugal”) connection because…. they’re women? So it would just be natural for women to be in an embrace, but now that we know they are men, this rocks the scientific community?
There are other little things at play as, well, which isn’t really addressed in the article but that I’ve seen in some comments: there seems to be a healthy dose of surprise that there were gay people even back then, when we already know that homosexuality as been recorded throughout most of human history.
And then the idea that this makes that poignant embrace even more poignant, somehow. I admit to never really looking into what genders the two bodies were, or what type of relationship they had. For some reason it never crossed my mind to wonder. It’s a poignant image no matter what- father and son, mother and daughter, lovers or sisters, friends or cousins.
It is the image of two people in their final embrace, there is nothing more poignant than that, and I don’t think that knowing the genders or relationship of the people changes that poignancy. For all we know, they were two men fighting and happened to land like that when the volcano killed them. We don’t know. We only know that they were unrelated men. We know next to nothing else, least of all whether they were emotionally connected or gay.
But the internet seems to be running with that conclusion, with very few examining all of the implications that come with that hypothesis.